The Assumption of the Rogues and Rascals

Elizabeth Smart was born in Ottawa, Canada, in 1913. She was educated at private schools in Canada and for a year at King's College, University of London. One day, while browsing in a London bookshop, she chanced upon a slim volume of poetry by George Barker - and fell passionately in love with him through the printed word. Eventually they communicated directly and, as a result of Barker's impecunious circumstances, Elizabeth Smart flew both him and his wife to the United States. Thus began one of the most extraordinary, intense and ultimately tragic love affairs of our time. They never married but Elizabeth bore George Barker four children and their relationship provided the impassioned inspiration for one of the most moving and immediate chronicles of a love affair ever written - By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. Originally published in 1945, this remarkable book is now widely recognized as a classic work of poetic prose which, more than four decades later, has retained all of its searing poignancy, beauty and power of impact. After the war, Elizabeth Smart supported herself and her family with journalism and advertising work. In 1963 she became literary and associate editor of Queen magazine but subsequently dropped out of the literary scene to live quietly in a remote part of Suffolk. Elizabeth Smart died in 1986.

Smart's much-admired 1945 novel, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, was inspired by her longtime love affair with poet George Barker. This 1978 novel picks up where that earlier book left off, with the narrator, like Smart, meditating on the leavings of love?among them four children. It is a despairing look at life by a woman whose chance at love has come and gone, and though very little happens in the way of plot, the prose is gorgeous. Smart's narrative calls to mind some of the greatest modernists, as when her narrator, overwhelmed by the trivialities of her mundane life as a mother, sinks into a paralysis reminiscent of that of Eliot's Prufrock. "After I had given birth to my first child, I felt time and space come whorling back into the empty space where it had lain. And Einsteinian demons came rushing to attack me with the terrible nature of the naked truth. But now I sit in country kitchens, discussing the minor discomforts of childbirth, and the domestic details of love." This is a somewhat bitter meditation on love and loneliness, but Smart's poetic prose makes it a book of high literary merit.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.